“An outreach is serving as a resource through intense two-way engagement.” – Answers.com

The engagement could be based on:

• Sharing a new research
• Building new relations
• Connecting public for fun, program/conference etc.
• Business conversation

Research based, complete and to-the-point text can be a good Email outreach but the bad email address, formatting, bad English, wrong name and subject can turn good outreach to bad.

I’ve recently changed my email address to my domain based email kumail [at] kumailhemani (dot) com on important accounts. I received a spam email earlier “in my inbox”. I was just about to delete it when the word SEOmoz.org in the body caught my eye.

Here is the screenshot of the email:

Let’s compare the good and bad parts of this email:

Good Part

• This email has a reference: she tries to be personalized with the reference of my SEOmoz.org profile
• Her aim was clear and what she wants.
• Her name at the end help me to call with her name next time (if I email back)

Bad Part

• No personalization: I had also listed my name in the profile – she could easily personalize the email with my name.
• Formatting: not enough spaces, paragraphs and punctuations
• Bad English
• Dual email: she sent me the email from a different email account and asked me to reply on her hotmail address.
• Subject: “hello dear” subject typically looks spammy. It could be something better related to my work or call me by name.

Useful resources to learn outreach email:

Good Outreach vs. Bad Outreach, by Dana Forman

What Separates a “Good” Outreach Email from a “Great” One?, by Randfish

Please feel free to ask questions about email outreach in the comments below.

Special Thanks to @Sha Menz for the copy-editing help.